JTL: “Tort, No-Fault and Real-World Compensation,” A Volume in Honor of Jeffrey O’Connell

The next issue of the Journal of Tort Law is a tribute to Jeffrey O’Connell, who died in January of 2013.  From the Introduction:

O’Connell’s overriding goal was to make compensation more readily available to the injured. He saw traditional tort law as dilatory, unfair, inefficient and hence inadequate to address the pressing needs of injury victims. In pursuing reform, he necessarily took a stand in the theoretical debate about the purposes of tort law. In the typical case, he believed, tort should be compensatory; matters of individualized justice or deterrence were secondary. Given the realities of tort litigation as he saw them, O’Connell believed justice and deterrence goals were both harder to accomplish and harder to measure than a compensation objective. On this understanding, tort law is best justified as insurance and yet, for that very reason, was ripe for radical reform, given its deficiencies. At heart, O’Connell was deeply practical and pragmatic. He wanted his ideas to matter for the world and he valued the tangible good of victim compensation over what he took to be more speculative goods.

The papers that follow reference O’Connell’s pragmatism, but also branch out to touch on many different aspects of his work. Robert Rabin finds that mass tort and disaster relief claims are today being handled on terms congruent with O’Connell’s efforts to realign the tort system to focus on compensation. Kenneth Abraham and G. Edward White combine O’Connell’s love of biography with his interest in tort law to study the life and influence of a scholar who was in many ways a forerunner and kindred spirit: William Prosser. Nora Freeman Engstrom, in the spirit of O’Connell’s critiques of tort, turns the tables by subjecting no-fault programs to careful analysis. Anthony Sebok finds one of O’Connell’s early first-party insurance proposals relevant to currently heated debates over litigation finance. Zoë Sinel challenges O’Connell’s claim that tort is properly understood and assessed by its ability to deliver compensation. Finally, Christopher Robinette finds in O’Connell’s scholarship guidance as to how to begin distinguishing those tort suits worthy of individualized justice treatment from those better suited to serve a compensatory objective.

The pieces are available at De Gruyter’s “Ahead of Print” section, though I believe Tony’s and Nora’s articles are not yet included.